The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, is convinced that he will form a government, and that to do so he will be able to reach an agreement with Junts per Catalunya. For the moment, the inexcusable condition set by that party is an amnesty. The second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, declared on Sunday in La Vanguardia that, in exchange for this amnesty, JxC must renounce unilaterality in the declaration of independence. Sánchez, for his part, does not speak out.
“I will speak when it’s my turn,” the acting president said this Tuesday in an informal chat with journalists at the United Nations headquarters, in what was intended to be a clear reference to the moment in which he will be entrusted with the constitution of the Government by the King, given the foreseeable failure of the investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. The acting president did not mention the word “amnesty”, although he insisted time and again that Catalan society has endorsed a policy that is based “on coexistence and harmony”, and recalled that less than 10% of society Catalan is betting on unilaterality, in what seems to be a reference to the votes obtained by JxC on July 23. According to the President of the Government’s approach, the other 90% of Catalonia is asking for an agreement.
The implicit corollary of this argument is clear: either JxC agrees to renounce unilateralism in the search for independence or it remains outside the Catalan political sphere and its decline ends up becoming terminal. The question is what that training can ask for. The answer is simple: amnesty for all those prosecuted for the events of October 2017. Sánchez did not want to get involved in that.
But it seems clear that this is already becoming one of the axes – if not the main axis – of the negotiation. The acting president also avoided commenting on whether the eventual pardon would be before or after his inauguration and the constitution of a new Government. The strategy of both JxC and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) is to first achieve the amnesty and then negotiate to reach an agreement with those prosecuted for the referendum of October 1, 2017. In 2020, the abstention of ERC in the investiture of Sánchez, allowed him to become president.
Sánchez downplayed the tensions over this possible agreement within the PSOE, among which were those launched by former president Felipe González. Sánchez insisted that the PSOE as such has not commented on the negotiation, but he showed absolute confidence that, when it does, it will be to support “four years of progressive Government.” But the acting president insisted that, according to the Statutes of the PSOE, once the investiture agreement was reached, the militants and sympathizers should ratify it.
The head of the Government compared his management with those of his predecessors, Felipe González and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who, he said, modernized the PSOE to adapt it to the historical moment they were in and then moved Spain forward. Sánchez also insisted that her relationship with Yolanda Díaz is very fluid and that he stays in regular contact with her.
The one he did not spare attacks with was Feijóo. The head of the Executive redoubled his criticism at his rally on Sunday of the general secretary of the PP, whom he accused of being weak and of being subject to the orders of what he called “the hard wing” of the PP; constituted, according to what he said, by former president José María Aznar and by the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz-Ayuso. Sánchez described the protest event called by the PP for next Sunday as “nonsense” and insisted that it is typical of a leader without any type of autonomy.
Following his usual strategy, Sánchez insisted on putting the PP as the only partner of Vox, and downplayed the protest made this Tuesday by the deputies of the latter party to leave their headphones in the president’s empty seat as a protest at the entry into office. vigor of the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the Congress of Deputies.
Finally, the President of the Government admitted that his interlocutors in the US ask him about how the government formation process is going, but that they do so without signs of concern or concern. Sánchez met on Monday in New York with representatives of the television and Hollywood giant NBC, which in turn is part of the cable and internet company Comcast. Sánchez said he was unaware of the very harsh editorial published two weeks ago by the Washington Post with statements by its former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, in which the Editorial Board of the American newspaper stated that “Spain has been taken hostage by a faction of separatist extremists.”
One of the most striking characteristics of the informal meeting with journalists was how Sánchez grew as he spoke, so that he went from initially being “reasonably optimistic” about the possibility of an agreement that would allow his inauguration as head of the Government, to affirm, 25 minutes later, that it does not contemplate an electoral advance.